I’ll admit I’m a little particular about what I use to write. I recently purchased a two-pack of those tiny blue Moleskine notebooks, despite owning plenty of unfilled pages in other things already, because I thought the dimensions would be better suited to jotting notes for stories on the go. I spent a silly amount of money just to be able to have a very tiny notebook in my pocket at all times. 

From what I gather, I’m not the only one with writerly idiosyncrasies. Anne Lamott assures me that she can’t leave her house without a supply of index cards and a pen. A lost idea, or even a lost phrase, usually can’t be recovered from mental oblivion. Index cards seem like a good solution—they’re certainly cheaper than Moleskines—but I feel like I’m just as prone to losing scraps of cardstock as I am to losing thoughts. I’d been typing notes into my cell phone for a while, but I’d rather not rely on things that might run out of batteries halfway through a sentence. So tiny blue books it is.

While I prefer taking notes with ink and paper, something in the creative side of my brain gets shut off when I try to write at length by hand. Maybe it’s just that I’m part of the Internet generation (or Generation Y, or the Facebook generation, or whatever they’re calling us these days). I can’t do it. It reminds me of in-class essays and AP exams in high school. I get automatically bored when I have to literally pen an article. I’ve been writing on the computer since I was six years old (my dad set me up with a website back then; it was precious beyond words).  My hands are conditioned for QWERTY. Muscle memory kicks in, and suddenly it’s like there’s no barrier between my thoughts and the page on the screen. Having to shape the letters myself feels stifling and superfluous. I’m eternally grateful to the inventor of the keyboard. I have no idea how anyone did it before the typewriter. 

Even when writing on the computer, my organization gets weird.  I primarily use a netbook—a fantastic little Gateway I picked up about a year ago—so I don’t boot up OpenOffice unless I have to. It eats too much RAM and makes Pegasus (yes, I name my tech) cranky. So Wordpad it mostly is—and not the fancy Windows 7 version with all the word counting and the double spacing. I’m still running XP and the most I can do with my word processor is alter the font. Which is fine; I like the cleanness of the page, the lack of formatting options or margins or even page breaks. It allows me not to be concerned with thoughts of printing or publishing, so I can get raw thoughts out less formally and polish them later. 

I keep huge .rtf files as scratchpads. I can’t create a new file for each project; that would be like writing on individual sheets of paper rather than a bound notebook. Even though I have practically endless space in these “books”, after a while I decide that they’re full. I close them up. I make a new document and start clean. It’s probably because scrolling down past all my old writing to start something new gets obnoxious, but cutting into that first paragraph of a new .rtf is a big creative rush. I start fresh, get excited, and I think my writing is better for it. 

So there’s that. Even in this digital age, when everything I do could be organized in a completely logical fashion, I go ahead and do things according to rules even I don’t quite understand. They just feel right, and they’re better for coaxing sentences out of my brain and onto the page. But I’ll bet I’m not the only one with particular writing habits. What are some of the special ways you organize your words?

(Photo credit: Hugh MacLeod)